Artist, Illustrator & Designer

Starry Night Owls: How to make your own felt owl baby mobile

August 4, 2013

This is a fun, simple woodland themed project for crafty inclined people to make for that special baby in their lives. A few pieces of felt, some thread and a simple bit of stitching can help you put together a beautiful unique mobile. By using the templates and instructions below you can create a quirky woodland scene complete with owls, stars and the moon, you can even customise it yourself by using different coloured felt.

What will I need?

Materials

Felt in your chosen colours and complimentary coloured thread. (Be as creative as you like, but if you would like to follow my design I used the following colours from seamstar.co.uk; Chestnut/Cream/White/Dahlia/Fawn/Sable)

Toy Stuffing

A wooden dowel rod (I used 2 x 46cm lengths)

A screw type metal hook

(Optional) A battery-powered mirror ball motor (I got a white one from Maplin)

You will also need;

A drill to make holes in the dowel rod.

White paint to paint the dowel rods.

Glue to stick the two rods together.

Step by step instructions

Print out the below cutting guide (.pdf file) onto thickish card and cut out the shapes.

Cut out individual shapes from the appropriate colour felt as per the instructions on the cutting guide. I cheated a little by folding over the felt and cutting through more than one layer to speed up the process. This actually helped to produce identical wing shapes and body shapes which made the owls look neater.

(n.b) You can either cut out all the pieces for one owl and then sew it up if you like to see a quick result from all your hard work, or cut out all the pieces needed for all five owls and stars/moon shapes and then approach the project like a mass production machine. However you chose to work, just follow these steps for each owl shape.

Place two pieces of felt together for the wing and stitch them together using backstitch to form one wing, repeat for the other wing. Then sew on the friendly features of your owls, the eyes and the beak. I used satin stitch for the eyes and beak.

Attach the light coloured body and face section onto your main darker coloured body section again using back stitch, you don’t have to worry so much at this stage about keeping the back of the stitching neat as this won’t be seen when you build your owl.

Attach the wings and the tail pieces on to the back of the main body section, do this loosely as you will be stitching over this part again.

Now you can attach the back section to the owl using back stitch, leaving a finger-width hole at the bottom to allow you to stuff the owl. Try to keep your back stitch as neat as possible on both sides of the owl as you will see them in the finished piece.

Stuff that bird! Once your bird is pleasantly plump you can stitch the hole you left closed.

Now finally you need to stick your two dowel rods together by cutting a notch out of both of them and gluing them together. Paint the entire rods white (or your colour of choice) and make small holes at the ends of the dowel rods. This is where you will be hanging the birds from. You should be able to simply screw your hook into a small hole that you make in the centre of the rods with your drill.

Once you have worked out the arrangement of your owls and stars/moon you can simply attach them to the dowel rods by sewing through the centre of each stuffed piece. I tried to tilt the owls slightly for a perfect baby-eyed view.